


within the sea

by palmviolet



Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Domesticity, F/F, Internalized Misogyny, Marisa has a lot of issues to work through, Mary is there to provide tough love/acts of service alternately, Motherhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:01:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29160834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palmviolet/pseuds/palmviolet
Summary: “Things would have been so much easier if Lyra was a boy.”She barely feels the words slip off her tongue; what she does feel, however, is the full force of Mary’s sea-stained stare, though she doesn’t look up to meet it. Mary’s gentle fingers still in their tracing through her hair.“Why do you say that?” Mary says, in that gentle way of hers.
Relationships: Lyra Belacqua & Marisa Coulter, Marisa Coulter/Mary Malone
Comments: 8
Kudos: 52





	within the sea

**Author's Note:**

> for mya <3

“What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?”  
— _Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit_ , Jeanette Winterson

“Things would have been so much easier if Lyra was a boy.”

She barely feels the words slip off her tongue; what she does feel, however, is the full force of Mary’s sea-stained stare, though she doesn’t look up to meet it. Mary’s gentle fingers still in their tracing through her hair.

“Why do you say that?” Mary says, in that gentle way of hers, though Marisa can hear the probing in it. She’s never witnessed Mary in her element as she leads a tutorial, but this is what she imagines it’s like. Seeking questions passed through a kindly demeanour, meant to draw out some greater truth about physics or the universe (but not God. Never God, she’s learning)—and Marisa wonders, a little bitterly, how far she would have gone if she’d had a teacher like Mary. 

Still, “It’s a fractious relationship, isn’t it? Mothers and daughters. Mothers and sons don’t have nearly the same trouble.” She knows this much, from her brother’s easy fondness of their cold, un-fond mother. 

There’s a silence. She feels herself stiffening as if for a blow, though she knows, logically, that a blow won’t come. “Not necessarily. I was very close with my mother. My brothers hated her; I was her friend til the end.” Her _friend._ Mary’s voice is light, a little bit absent, like she’s remembering, bringing back visions of long red hair and sun glittering on water. Marisa’s chest feels tight. 

“How fortunate,” she finds herself saying, with a brittle edge of spite. She pulls her head from Mary’s lap—they were on the sofa together, Mary’s hands in her hair, how ridiculously _quaint_ —and sits up facing her, the defensiveness rearing up in her throat, the bitterness something learnt. 

“Marisa,” Mary says, instead of rising on the offensive to meet her—just three syllables, the name _her mother_ gave her, but it’s enough to deflate all the tension and make her chest cave in. “What are you getting at?”

Direct, simple, impertinent. Marisa’s first impressions weren’t wrong, none of them—they rarely are—but she’s grown used to these things. The way Mary will make food without asking, and press a hot dish of it into her hands, something foreign to her but tasting suspiciously domestic, like Mary took a vial of the warm, soft air in the house and distilled it into the sauce. The way Mary will tell her when she has coffee froth on her lip (or, on one memorable occasion, wipe it away for her). And most of all, the way Mary isn’t afraid of her.

Not at all.

“I’m getting at—” She sucks in a breath. “I’m—”

Mary’s hand is on her arm. How does she do that? How is she so— so _casual_ , throwing around the golden warmth of her touch like it’s _nothing_ , like it’s _easy_ , when really it’s the most difficult thing in the world? 

“Women in my world aren’t like women in yours,” she settles on, though it’s the wrong thing to say, because Mary’s fingers curl tighter into her sleeve and she’s got one of those big frowns on her face, now, the ones where her eyebrows crease together and those big eyes go round with concern…

“Are they all like you?”

Marisa blinks at her. The idea is laughable. “No.”

“Well, then. There’s no one idea of ‘womanhood’, then, is there? Just like there’s no one idea of mothers and daughters. I know a mother who had cancer, once, a single woman, and her daughter had to take care of her. But then the mother got better, physically, but her mind was still in that well of… I guess you could call it _vulnerability_ , and when the daughter withdrew the mother couldn’t understand why… couldn’t understand that her daughter needed to live her own life, after spending so long looking after the life of her mother…”

Marisa swallows. “What happened?”

“The mother disowned her. The poor girl became a ward of the state. Because there are things you don’t _do_ as a parent, you know? You don’t put the burden of yourself on your child. But who could blame her? And so it goes.”

“Is there a point to this?”

“Would you stop being so dismissive?” Mary says, loudly, and Marisa closes her mouth. “I’m not saying you’re the mother. What I’m saying is that mothers can be good and they can be bad, and it doesn’t matter what gender their child is, really, because mummy’s boy and daddy’s girl are _definitely_ a myth, you can blame bloody Freud for that…”

Marisa doesn’t know who Freud is. She also knows better than to interrupt now.

“You’re hiding behind all this, and because I think we’ve established I hate Freud I’m not going to play psychoanalyst to your many-layered psyche but I also think it might help if you actually _talked to me_ for once, rather than hiding behind that perfect face of yours and getting defensive when you even hint at what’s going on inside your head…”

Mary’s face is disconcertingly close to hers. Marisa’s eyes trace the soft strokes of her features, the gentle lines that frame them that tell of nothing less than knowledge, experience, intelligence. Maybe… “You don’t know what that would cost me.”

Mary, if that’s possible, moves even closer. “You’re not under the Magisterium now. Emotions aren’t secrets. Your lifeisn’t a political campaign trail. And who am I going to tell?”

There’s so little distance between them that if Marisa chose this moment to flirt, they’d have sex on this sofa, she knows. But a voice in her head, suspiciously Irish, tells her that that would be yet another diversion. Another distraction ploy. She’s constructed herself as a hall of mirrors, and it’s been easy, because men only see themselves and admire how pretty they look. Mary is different.

She feels the strength of Mary’s hold on her, belied by her gentle hands. She’s not sure she could get away with avoiding the question. Not living under Mary’s roof, not sharing her toothpaste. Watching what they call _television_ (or as Mary calls it, “crap telly”) in the evenings. Mary’s favourites are the quiz shows: _The Chase_ , _Pointless, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire_. At first Marisa didn’t know a single answer; now she knows the date of Princess Diana’s death, the site of the Royal Derby, the name of every _Eastenders_ cast member. She learns; she adapts; she grows. 

So, with her head pillowed on Mary’s chest, resisting the hot snap of discomfort at such ~~weakness~~ ~~vulnerability~~ closeness, she opens her mouth. “I am to Lyra what my mother was to me.”

And Mary listens. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading & let me know what you think! i love mary and marisa so much and seeing my girlfriend fall in love with them i just had to write something else, so here xx
> 
> talk to me about maryisa on [tumblr](https://palmviolet.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/joycefinkels)


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